Decentralized finance (DeFi) is growing fast. Total value locked, a measure of money managed by DeFi protocols, has grown from $10 billion to a little more than $40 billion over the last two years after peaking at $180 billion. The elephant in the room? More than $10 billion was lost to hacks and exploits in 2021 alone. Feeding that elephant: Today’s smart contract programming languages fail to provide adequate features to create and manage assets — also known as “tokens.” For DeFi to become mainstream, programming languages must provide asset-oriented features to make DeFi smart contract development more secure and …

For decades, banks and insurance firms employed the same mostly static but highly profitable and centralized business models. Also for decades, Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google have monopolized user data for their profit. However, blockchain projects could significantly challenge Big Tech’s grip on user data. In 2015, the future of money was at the forefront of financial experts’ minds at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, they started to seriously focus on the challenges presented by the rise of Bitcoin (BTC), digital assets and fintech. The world of finance began to realize that …

It's barely been a decade since the launch of Web3, and some are already talking about the next generation of the web — Web5. The concept of Web5 first emerged earlier this year with Jack Dorsey’s announcement about plans to build a decentralized web on Bitcoin's blockchain through Block subsidiary TBD. According to Dorsey's TBD white paper, Web5 will be “a trustless, decentralized internet platform where users own their data” as opposed to Web3, which is mostly centered around Ethereum and a select few centralized blockchain networks. It's easy to see why there is a need for change, but is …

Users losing funds due to malicious activity is hardly unknown on Ethereum. In fact, it is the very reason researchers recently developed a proposal to introduce a type of token that is reversible in the event of a hack or other unsavory behaviors. Specifically, the suggestion would see the creation of an ERC-20R and ERC-721R, which would be modified versions of the standards that govern both regular Ethereum tokens and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The premise goes like this: this new standard would allow users to make a “freeze request” on recent transactions that would lock those funds until a “decentralized …

When I worked for Riot Games as its head of player acquisition in the European Union, I learned about player onboarding and long-term retention. Both are crucial to the success of gamer acquisition. I’ve seen the mechanics of user retention in gaming, and what I’ve learned is that most cryptocurrency games today lack the mechanics to keep players interested for even a short period of time. Why haven’t more top-tier games introduced real-world rewards into their games? These are the titles where 99.9% of gamers are not professional esports athletes and enjoy no monetary rewards for the thousands of hours …

Like many people, I was originally dubious of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter given his historic tendency to make bold promises but later back away. That said, there is merit to his idea of adding a subscription layer to Twitter and using it to both improve curation and diversify away from advertising. If you believe in the core values of crypto, you should believe in it. To see why, we need to revisit the basics of Bitcoin (BTC). Most people focus their attention on the coin, but the more remarkable thing about Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention was the design of the …

Giant companies like Apple have made a fortune by centralizing their powers and profits and expanding their product and services network to be a part of people’s lives in as many ways as they can. Until recently, however, Apple had also demonstrated an ability to tunnel-focus its efforts to stay relevant and up to date with what consumers wanted, what mattered to them and what they needed most from the tech giants they rely on. It seems that this is not strictly true anymore, and that is a real shame. In its updated App Store guidelines unveiled on Oct. 24, …

Over the last year, venture capitalists poured more than $4.6 billion into infrastructure and projects related to nonfungible tokens (NFTs). This infrastructure now needs users. They will come when people understand that they can apply these NFTs not just for speculative purposes but to design and structure their everyday activities. For these, they don’t need NFTs — they need to sort their lives out. And, decentralized catalogs are there to help them do it. We can think about an NFT as a book someone owns, and this ownership is recorded on the blockchain. But what we’re actually missing is the …

In Celsius Network’s recent court filing, the billion-dollar centralized finance (CeFi) platform exposed more than 14,000 pages of customer identity and on-chain transaction data without user consent — a prescient reminder that privacy absent decentralization is no privacy at all. As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, CeFi lending giant Celsius Network disclosed names and on-chain transaction data of tens of thousands of its customers in an Oct. 5 court filing. While Celsius’ user base complied with standard Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures in order to open personal accounts with the CeFi platform, none consented to nor could have anticipated a …

Subscription-based services have become so ubiquitous it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t the norm. Streaming companies have sought to take advantage of that norm by fleecing consumers for everything they’re worth — just look at Netflix’s decision to start running advertisements. Another benefit of leveraging NFT technology is that streaming services can increasingly be used to create communities. As with all consumer culture in the digital world, we are what we consume. NFTs, however, have the potential to make the relationship between the consumer and what is consumed far more profound. There is a solution to streaming …

Over the past few years, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have introduced a clear paradigm shift in blockchain governance. With their community decision-making and adherence to hardcoded rules, they have challenged the role of hierarchy and central authority that are present in modern organizations, especially as it pertains to business. Ideologically, DAOs have a lot in common with democracies: individuals holding an amount of a DAO’s specific token can allocate those tokens as votes on governance proposals. Once voting has concluded, the final outcome is executed autonomously by smart contracts. In functional democracies, however, citizens elect representatives to legislate laws and …

The future of how we socialize online is being defined as we speak, and it’s far too important to leave things to the likes of Meta and other mega social companies. Just a surface-level look at Meta’s history is enough to understand its tendency to severely miss the mark. Some companies like to use Web3 principles to right the wrongs of Web2. And as a poster child for large, centralized organizations, Meta offers us some of the most useful examples of those wrongs. Let’s touch on three times that Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences. …